Laura Mitchell is the Executive Director of Student Experience at Concordia University.
In 2015, she became the Director of the new Student Success Centre at Concordia, and continues to teach in the Centre's University Skills for Success courses. A newly expanded and specially-designed Success Centre space was completed at the end of February 2020, ready for when students returned to campus.
What role do you see for retention in the university ecosystem in general?
I feel strongly that it's absolutely key. When we admit students to our university, whether they’re undergraduates or graduates, it's our duty to strive towards making an environment in which they can succeed to the best of their abilities.
Institutions in Canada are many different sizes and I happen to work at one of the largest ones. So by no means is that an easy or simple task. It's something that requires ongoing collaborative partnerships, communications and connections. To seriously make it work, we need to be working on it all the time.
I've heard it said before that for universities, enrollment is life, and that's absolutely true. That’s what brings in new generations to our university. But it's not just enrolment, it's also retention.
“I love that it's very unusual to hear anyone say to a student, ‘Well, maybe you're just not meant to be here.’ We’re trying to eliminate that entirely.”
In your experience, has retention been an important part of university operations? And if not, why do you think that is?
Looking back over the last ten, fifteen years – certainly when I started – retention was not something that we spoke about. As a professor I was largely unaware of this concept and so I think it's been great to see retention become more widely spoken about over the past decade. I think that has been partly because of the centrality of student services. At Concordia, not that long ago, student services were an add-on to Facilities, Maintenance and IT! It gives you a sense of where it’s been.
When I started at Concordia, the Deputy Provost was tasked with bringing student services out of general services and under the wing of the academic office. That made all of the difference and allowed us to form the Student Success Center, consolidating our health services under campus wellness and support. It really meant that student success was at the table for almost all senior academic discussions. It moved to the core of the university's priorities. I think that gave me a job! It really reflected the increasing complexity, importance and visibility of the services that support students.
By no means do I imply that Student Services own retention; it's a job for everybody. But I liked having a central point from which students could access a lot of the support. And I'm extremely grateful for the level of conversations that I've always been included in at Concordia. I speak to the President and the Provost on a very regular basis. That may not be the case at all institutions, right?
It’s taken us considerable work and strategy to embed retention as being important at a high level and to keep connecting people. Where I see the difference now is there's a much greater understanding across the board in the university of differences in learning, of diversity, and of pressures on students as well. I love that it's very unusual to hear anyone say to a student, “Well, maybe you're just not meant to be here.” We’re trying to eliminate that entirely. I see much more cohesion, much more of a collaborative goal across faculty, staff and senior administrators.
Can you talk about the impact or benefits of retention from an institutional perspective, a student delivery perspective and the individual student perspective?
I think if we do this right, the three of these should really be fused. What’s good for the student is good for the institution because it's a connected approach. The institution shows its commitment upon admitting the student to provide the environment in which they can succeed.
We can't separate student learning in the academic mission from student life experience or from the students' future goals and career outcomes. There's been an incremental acknowledgement of that too, which I've loved to see. I think maybe even a decade ago, there was much more feedback of, “Why would a university need a career center, that's not what we're here for.”
I think now we've got a much better support system for students and have enough room to experience being with them along the whole journey.
One of our strategic goals this year for student services at Concordia is to work better together. So we've spent the year fostering connections between all of our staff so the students are holistically served. That way, if they are applying for a job, career services and the writing center can work together to get them guidance on how to present themselves.
I think another benefit of all of this is that we can be a bit more flexible and meet students' needs in a timely way. Because success means a different thing to a different student on a different day, but this experience has really shown that they don't need all the services all the time. The key is that the relationship needs to be established so that they can come back when they do need help.
It's about cohesion and timeliness and working together so that things are not duplicated. That's a constant battle.
In your experience, do at-risk students share any commonalities or are they as random on the surface as the entire student body appears to be?
So we run complimentary credit courses called “University skills for success” and they’re for students who have fallen into failed standing or a conditional standing – basically students on probation.
We're in our fourth academic year of the courses. We run 26 sections because they're for undergraduates from all faculties. There are two courses: the first one is self-management strategies and it's more about getting yourself back on track, remembering why you came to university and bringing you back to a positive learning experience after this low point of your career. And then the second one adds onto that a study skills component. It's basically a soft skills and hard skills split.
Through that course, my team comes in contact with a great number of students at risk and on probation and the conclusion that I often reach is that these students are just like any others, but some difficult circumstance has challenged them in some way.
In fact, we did a survey in the first year of this program to ask, “How did this happen? How did you fall into failed standing?” It was really interesting. The things that were mentioned were finances or work, so students working very long, arduous part-time hours to finance their studies. Transition into university came up in a lot of cases, where they realized in hindsight that they didn't have the skills they needed, and they didn’t know what those skills were at the time!
And then there’s psychology. About 50% of the students had gone through a depression or were suffering from anxiety. A considerable percentage had family issues that they were dealing with as well. In a place like Concordia where our students are hugely diverse, many are caretakers for family members, and many have children.
So there's an element of the traditional lack of academic preparedness for the big leap to university studies, but by far I think the greatest factor is just life difficulties intervening.
“Centralizing services can be something that makes people uncomfortable at universities because they're more decentralized by nature.”
What types of measures have you personally seen to be effective in an intervention and why do you think those are effective?
Centralizing services, to some extent, can be something that makes people uncomfortable at universities because they're more decentralized by nature. It’s not always negative though, it can mean that there's a place that serves as a central hub of the wheel, through which everybody can be contacted and collaborated with. I think the benefit of the student success centers at Concordia is the sheer visibility. Here’s a place that you can show up and we will either help you or navigate you towards people who can. So it’s a case of communication and clarity, allowing students to easily find the things that are going to help them.
And then the other side is interventions, like our class where a team of great learning specialists and teachers very carefully planned a 13-week program where students could reflect on their values: who they are, why they're there, what they want out of the experience, what went wrong and where they would like to go from here. Basically, to take that time – time that we don't always get – to reflect on the purpose of the journey and why you're in it.
And that class at the moment is students who have gone through academic difficulty or who are going through it, but we're trying on an incremental basis to make it accessible to new students or to students at an earlier stage because that's where we want to help them. We don't want to wait until they're deep in big challenges and difficulties to be like, “Oh, we’ll help you now!”
The challenge there is the scale. Concordia admits seven thousand or more undergraduates a year, and this class I mentioned takes place in groups of twenty five. So we need to identify who it can help the most.
I did that analysis just last year, I went through everybody's records to see if they were still enrolled. I was really heartened to see the impact of the class: about 25% of the first two years of cohorts had already graduated so they had gotten themselves back on track. A large number were also still in their program doing well. So, it was great to see it work.
Can you tell me about the impact that you've seen intervening with an at-risk student at the critical transition to first year?
In terms of transition to first year, the work that we did with CRI on the retention survey had us asking students to reflect on where they're at coming in, along with any challenges that they're feeling. I couldn't give you one particular case, but we were able to proactively reach out to the students, and depending on their assessment scores, we could offer them different supports. We have a first-year transitions counselor who works in the student success center. So rather than the counseling and psychological services where students would go if they're having more significant psychological distress, we put this person in place to talk to incoming students about anything: homesickness, adjusting to Montreal, feeling overwhelmed, missing their family, whatever it might be.
We really saw a big impact in the two years after we first began these interventions. In the intervention class, I've got a picture in mind of a male student who hadn't actually completed anything in his first year. He hadn't completed his exams, and at the end of his first year he had a GPA of zero.
He went through our program and I think he just just hadn't realized what a proper transition looked like and what university work was going to look like and how to best approach it and how to manage time. And he actually ended up with a GPA of about 3.5 or something at the end of his second year. So that’s an example of somebody who clearly has the academic skills but just didn't know how to use them or how to apply them, what to prioritize.
“I think about if I was an incoming student right now, what would help me? If I’m a student at risk right now, what would help me? What about if I'm a graduating student? It starts with just trying to put ourselves in those positions.”
Finally, do you have any ideas of how retention efforts need to change to help institutions improve retention for students that are stuck at home and are probably going to be taking their next semester online?
Well, students can’t exactly come to us. We're thinking about how we can go to them. Our students are all over the world, and they may not be able to make it on campus in time for fall or they might be studying somewhere else. So we're looking at using our fantastic student employees and trained student mentors called the Welcome Crew, to just show that there's somebody on that day thinking of you at Concordia. Again, it’s all about connection. We’ve always worked closely with recruitment and with academic advisors who are really important, but we really had to step that up, and put ourselves in the mindset of a student.
We have a very complicated Concordia website and we’ve got to thinking, “What word are these students going to be searching for? What comes up when we search for that? Is it up-to-date?” So for academic advisors, there's a lot of collaboration at the moment to help put the right information online so students can look at their core programs and their course before they speak to an advisor and make a plan. Student services people have this mentality where we would crawl over hot coals in order to help a student. There have been snow days where we've tried to close in the past and my staff still keep saying “No, I'm coming! I’m gonna do the workshop,” and I have to say, “No, you're not, they're at home!”. We just need to use this time to reach out in the best ways we can. I think about if I was an incoming student right now, what would help me? If I’m a student at risk right now, what would help me? What about if I'm a graduating student? It starts with just trying to put ourselves in those positions.